Working with children -1

The different essay contest - 2007

We often hear it said that children have not learnt to think, to apply knowledge, they can only memorize and recall facts, that they are not creative any more, that they do not have the reading habit, that they lack the moral timbre to take positive and sound decisions. And so on and so forth.

I believe however that every child has it in her to do all this and more. We just do not give them the opportunity to explore their world and to discover themselves.

My work has taught me this about children: that they are willing and waiting.

The onus actually is on us.

Three years back I was part of a team that designed an essay-writing contest for children of classes 5 to 12 in a Chennai school. The children were divided into four groups. Each group was given different writing tasks, tasks that were carefully designed to appeal to them.

But everyone knows that most kids don't enjoy essay writing. Few children look forward to it, specially because most times the task requires them to write about a visit to a zoo or a letter to the Municipal Chairman about leaky drain pipes. We decided that we would be different. We would make the task interesting for them. My colleague Rohini and I brainstormed and came up with topics that ranged from the fantastic for the Class 5-6 kids to deeply introspective and reflective topics for the adolescents of Classes 11 and 12.

We topped it by addressing them in the school assembly before the contest. I addressed classes 5-8 and Rohini, the older group. She appealed to their more matured thinking by asking them to learn to plan and organize their thinking and writing. I appealed to the imagination of my younger audience by telling them that there was a Harry Potter ready to burst out of their brains if only they paid attention to him. The children listened intently and nodded.

Then we asked them how their essays should be evaluated - what they think we should look for in an essay. What was a good piece of writing? The children responded by giving us a list of parameters which defined what they thought was a good piece of writing. A fifteen-odd point checklist for evaluating their essays came entirely from them.

When the essays came - and how, there were some 600 essays to evaluate - we were stunned. Stunned because not one essay was a perfunctory or an obligatory bored attempt. Each one - even the worst - was earnest and sincere. We could sense effort in every word. In most of the essays, we could hear a struggling voice trying to catch and express furiously-tumbling thoughts and ideas.

Of course there were poorly written essays. And of course, there were some essays that showed poor thinking or a paucity of ideas. There were some that were politically correct and made all the right noises. But even these were not written grudgingly. Every essay showed that the writer had engaged in the task to her best capacity or as she deemed right. The active engagement showed.

One of our evaluators remarked that it seemed as if the children had been waiting for an opportunity to write. Indeed, that's how it seemed.

Which brings me back to my point. The children are willing and waiting. What are we doing to engage them? And more importantly, are we actively engaging with them at all?